The SCMS platform won two prestigious smart city awards for its pivotal role in the Ville de Laval smart lighting and dynamic signage panels project
Dimonoff: Spearheading a New Revolution
Today, as the world gets interconnected, industries and businesses must innovate to keep pace with citizen expectations and changing behaviours. However, when it comes to innovation and change, the topic of Smart Cities has become an industry where consumers look up to in fascination. The revolution in the world of Smart Cities came from urban lighting, with the arrival of LED, ten years ago, which enabled the installation of interconnected networked controls. Nowadays, cities and municipalities are considering the integration of different IoT devices to their street light network, which need to be controlled and monitored efficiently.
Bernard Tetu, a vibrant entrepreneur with a visionary mind, saw an opportunity in this field and decided to develop a management, control and monitoring IoT system that would change the future of smart cities. His original idea has grown into Dimonoff, one of the leading players in smart city management systems, competing & partnering with well-known multinational companies.
Since its inception in 2006, Dimonoff has been controlling and managing street light assets of cities, municipalities, and public spaces across Canada, the USA, South America, and Oceania. Besides optimizing, control and monitoring their management and inventory operations, the cities that have deployed the Dimonoff system have now laid the foundation of a communication backbone network for IoT devices, enabling the integration of additional smart services such as digital signage, motion sensors, and sewer level detectors, sound detection, ALPR (Automatic License Plate Recognition), cameras and many more.
Cutting-Edge Technologies for the Future
IoT (Internet of Things) technology is at the core of the smart city and public space projects. Regarded as one of the top-notch technologies in today’s economy, IoT change the way we manage municipal connected assets. Thus, IoT control and monitoring platform are promised to a brilliant future. However, the pressing need for today’s industry is to future-proof smart-city management platforms. Keeping this in mind, Dimonoff launched in March 2018 SCMS Connect{ED} a state-of-the-art software architecture with advanced functions that help city managers flexibly define and optimize their operations. This platform supports a myriad of systems including Current by GE (Lightgrid™), Telematics Wireless™ (T-Light), and Honeywell EnergyAxis ® (Netsense) and also enables the integration of multiple IoT devices (digital display panels, sewer-level sensors, sound monitoring and recognition, image recognition, rain and snow precipitation, parking monitoring, and many more). Moreover, unconnected city assets can be mapped and linked to the platform for an optimized and centralized inventory.
“Fully mobile and responsive, this platform has been designed from the ground up to an open and ultra-scalable software architecture (SaaS or using Microsoft Azure environment) to be at the heart of large-scale projects, ensuring a performance that meets the industry’s toughest requirements and largest scalability. The platform can manage IoT devices of either very large cities, states/provinces, hundreds of siloed smaller municipalities, campuses, or large commercial real estate owners to a single parking lot,” explains, Bernard Têtu, founder, Dimonoff. Since the deployment ensures the same performance, be it in large cities with internal IT department, or small municipalities without any IT resources, customers are no longer concerned about high disparities in Smart City system’s offering.
“SCMS Connect{ED} has an intuitive user interface and requires little to no training. To reflect the familiar environment of the workers according to their tasks, the dashboards are customizable for each user,” adds Têtu. Designed to be ultra-versatile, the platform allows customers to create and customize insightful and dynamic graphical reports. Alerts and notifications are sent out on smart devices or computers when a fault occurs on any asset and in real time. Also, built-in problem-solving tools are available to users and can be customized to meet their evolving needs.
User-Friendly, Reliability-Driven
Dimonoff offers an end-to-end solution for its customers across the globe which includes: Wireless Control and Remote Monitoring Platform, Wireless Smart Relays, Smart Controls and Sensors, Gateways and Interfaces. The company’s wireless control and remote monitoring platform helps city managers and employees to monitor, manage and control the network of IoT devices of a city, from a secure and versatile platform available anywhere, from any browser or Smartphone. Cities using Dimonoff also benefit from reduced electricity consumption, 24/7 instant fault and diagnostic reporting, completely integrated asset inventory management, optimized coordination of maintenance teams, and more.
In the early stages of the journey, Dimonoff’s customers were mainly car dealerships, municipal parks, seaports, and airports. These numerous projects have enabled Dimonoff to test and perfect the solution, before bringing to the large-scale deployments, and helped them to access the global market of cities with a reliable and proven system.
“It’s in 2012 that Dimonoff entered in the industry’s major leagues, with the City of Mississauga,” states Tetu. Dimonoff’s work on the Mississauga 50,000 street lights project drew the attention of Énergère, a company specializing in energy management. They retained Dimonoff services for a project in the city of Shawinigan involving their street lamps and the addition of sewer-level sensors, and then the City of Montreal, with the control of its 135,000 LED street lights. “Many US and Canadian cities followed, among which the Quebec Federation of Municipalities, which will recommend Dimonoff SCMS Connect{ED} to the municipalities who want to include a control and management software to their LED conversion project,” affirms Têtu.
To stay ahead of the competition, Dimonoff has also built strategic relationships with top-tier companies including Honeywell, NEC (and others under NDA), who uses Dimonoff products in their smart building projects. The company also has strong alliances with Arrow, Future Electronics, and Microsoft for Azure IoT and its CityNext initiative.
In the innovation lab, Dimonoff is also actively developing various sensors to respond to the growing market demand around the security and comfort of citizens. Among those are two special projects that are progressing at a very fast pace. “One is an ALPR (Automated License Plate Recognition) and the second is sound recognition (car crash, broken glass, screams, gunshots, etc.), both with the particularity that all processing is being done at the edge, thus providing the ability to eliminate the need for streaming and therefore, not having to invest in wired & fiber networks, which greatly contributes to reduce the cost of the required communication infrastructure,” explains Tetu.
Dimonoff, going forward, intends to continue its evolution and be a role model for other service providers in the industry. With alliances with Microsoft, Honeywell, NEC, Arrow Electronics and others, Dimonoff is poised for explosive growth.